I checked the event log and found an event with this string inside “service-specific error 10049“, it’s a little bit cryptic but the error stopped sql server 2008 from starting up properly.

I found that the problems were firstly, I told the sql server to NOT bind on all available IP addresses, so changed that back, and that secondly, one of the IP addresses I did tell it to bind to, wasn’t available when sql server restarted (a server vpn ip address – connection hadn’t been established). Binding to all IP address and removing the VPN address entry seemed to do the trick!

Not entirely sure what the problem is as I’ve not had time to investigate fully, but here is the scenario:

• Have a theme that has a top layer of navigation, easily sorted with wp_list_pages.
• On entering sub pages, siblings are shown on a second layer of navigation underneath the first one, again, quite straightforward.
• On drill down to grandchil page, another navigation panel is revealed to show other grandchildren siblings, should be simple enough to work, but doesn’t, the ‘child_of’ argument on wp_list_pages produces no output.

After trying so may different methods suggested on so many websites (in an attempt to get a quick solution), found I had to resort to a custom query to get it sorted:

$page = get_second_topmost_parent($post->ID);
$querystr = "SELECT wposts.* FROM $wpdb->posts wposts WHERE wposts.post_status = 'publish' AND wposts.post_type = 'page' AND wposts.post_parent = $page ORDER BY wposts.post_date DESC";
$pageposts = $wpdb->get_results($querystr, OBJECT);
if ($pageposts) {
	foreach ($pageposts as $post) {
		setup_postdata($post);
		echo "<li>" . get_the_title() . "</li>";
	}
}

Excuse the mess, but it will show 3rd level siblings (grandchildren) on an unordered list, should be simple enough to implement on your own website.  This solution makes use of a custom function that find the id of the parent page and shows its children:

function get_second_topmost_parent($post_id){
	$post = get_post($post_id); // get post data
	$parent_post_id = $post->post_parent; // get posts parent
	$second_post = get_post($parent_post_id); get post data of parent
	$second_parent_post_id = $second_post->post_parent; // get parent of parent
 
	if ($second_parent_post_id == 0){
		// if parent of parent has root id of 0, current page is a grandchild, return id
		return $post_id;
	} else {
		return get_second_topmost_parent($second_parent_post_id);
	}
}

Out of the box, FTP is disabled., you need to enable it, in addition, you’ll also need to upgrade the FTP software to v7.5, as the version that is bundled isn’t up to scratch (typical), though v7.5 is available as a free download from Microsoft.  The installation process is simple, though do uninstall the current ftp server software first (v7.0).

Once it’s all setup, configuration is simple via the management console, though FTP firewall rules will need to be added to your server, this is slightly complicated for Passive FTP, as it means opening more ports than perhaps you first think, to do this, you have to resort to the cmd line:

To configure Windows Firewall to allow non-secure FTP traffic, use the following steps:

1. Open a command prompt: click Start, then All Programs, then Accessories, then Command Prompt.
2. To open port 21 on the firewall, type the following then hit enter:
   

   netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP (non-SSL)" action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in localport=21

3. To enable stateful FTP filtering that will dynamically open ports for data connections, type the following syntax then hit enter:
   

   netsh advfirewall set global StatefulFtp enable

Now you need to go back into the FTP Firewall support option in the management console and setup a port range (something high like 50000-55000).

Additional Information:

More indepth information is available on the IIS site: Configuring Firewall FTP Settings.

1. click on the file menu, clear your cache!
2. click on the file menu again, clear the internal log buffer!
3. click on the refresh button on the toolbar!

That should get you in!

1. Sign up for a Google Account, this gives you access to Google Mail, then log in.
2. Click on the ‘Settings’ button on the top right of the screen.
3. Click on ‘Accounts’.
4. Click on ‘Add another email address you own’, a window will open, enter your details for the business email address.
5. You’ll be asked to verify this email address by having an email with a special link send to the business email address, log into your business email via the usual methods and click on the link, your email address will then be verified.
6. Now you should be back the the Accounts screen in Google Mail, click on ‘Add a mail account you own’ in the ‘Get mail from other accounts‘ section underneath, enter your business email address.
7. Now you’ll be asked for details about your email address, such as the username and the password, etc, remember that in a lot of cases, your username is your whole email address (e.g. sales@yourbusiness.com), you should be supplied any details that are required for this step.  Click on ‘ Label incoming messages’, this will allow you to easily distinguish personal emails from business ones, etc. Click on ‘Add Account’ when you’re done.

Now, any email that gets sent to your business email address (e.g. sales@yourbusiness.com) will get pulled into your Google Mail account (yourbusiness@googlemail.com), allowing you to send and receive emails from your own branded email address, while retaining all the functionality if the Google Mail service, magic!

1. Open Outlook
2. Make sure the ‘Web’ toolbar is visible, if it isn’t, right click anywhere on the main toolbar, and select ‘Web’, this should make a small toolbar appear with a small address bar on it, it might have the text ‘outlook:Inbox’ in it already.
3. Change this text to url of the html email you wish to send out, now the mailshot should appear in the panel below the toolbar (where emails might normally appear).
4. Go to the ‘Actions’ menu, you’ll see a ‘Send web page by email’ option at the bottom, this will create a new email with the mailshot as the main body content, all that’s left to do is to BCC all the recipients.

If you are having problems, it’s most likely that your outlook settings need changed to view email messages as html, rather than plain text:

1. go to tools > options > mail format
2. Compose in this message format: select HTML
3. UNCHECK Use Microsoft Word to edit email messages
4. UNCHECK Use Microsoft Word to read Rich Text email messages

Hopefully by now, you’ll be able to see the email in all it’s glory, all you have to do now is send it by BCC’ing everyone!

Let me know how you get on!

Firstly, you should change your FTP password, the code is being placed onto websites via hacked ftp passwords, then it injects malicious code into default documents in all folders across your entire ftp site.

In the cases that I have seen, they are using java to install even more malicious code onto your computer, you disable java support completely in firefox.  I would recommend that you do the same in Internet Explorer too.

Run some decent antivirus software and spyware removal tools, I use AVG and Spybot S+D, but they didn’t catch any of the more recent variants, use of AVAST with it’s resident shield helped, plus the great tools from SysInternals (RootKitRevealer, ProcessExplorer, etc) to identify rogue programs.

One last thing you could do is change your default document to something else, this will redirect users away from the infected server files if they get infected again, which they will do if you don’t change your FTP password. This is easy on linux as you just have to add another line into your htaccess file, there are no other configuration changes required.

I’ve also got a list of dodgy ip addresses that tried to connect to my ftp servers (but failed), I can only assume that these are infected computers, the list details computers located in 29 different countries, making it a widespread infection if you ask me!  In this case, set an ip filter on your ftp server to allow connections only from trusted ip sources, alternatively, you could also start to implement SFTP (or FTPS),  which is basically SSL over FTP, encrypting your data before it gets transmitted, making it impossible to decrypt (or at least take a very long time).

Let me know how you get on!

Turns out that when the UGA plugin (an excellent pluging by the way) is installed, it creates an options row called ‘ultimate_ga_options’ in the wp_options table (the table name might vary with your installation of wordpress/wpmu), the data stored in this row is stored in JSON format, difficult for normal people to decipher, but it’s just a collection (like xml), if you know how to read it, you can easily change it by hand.

My problem was that the previous domain name had 10 characters whereas the new domain name had much more.  When I done the simple search and replace, it replaced the previous domain with the new domain.  If you know JSON, there are two elements to every item, the length and the actual data itself.  The real problem was that the length did not match the data, the length was too short.

To sort the problem out, the fastest way is to deactivate the pugin, remove the whole row manually and re-activiate the plugin, all should be working fine after that!

Let me know how you get on.

• Stop IIS
• Open the IIS Metabase file (search for ‘MetaBase.xml’) in notepad or your favorite XML Editor
• DELETE the line that reads ‘Enable32BitAppOnWin64=”TRUE”‘
• Restart IIS

Now your asp.net tab should now be back!

$sidebars = array(‘page_top’, ‘right_col’, ‘bottom_left’, ‘bottom_right’);
foreach($sidebars as $sidebar) {
register_sidebar(array(‘name’=> $sidebar,
‘before_widget’ => ”,
‘after_widget’ => ”,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h3>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h3>’,
));
}

Let me know if you have any problems!